Ask students to name the aspects of science class they enjoy most, and working on labs will undoubtedly be mentioned. What often won't be included, however, is writing lab reports. For many students, the process of exploration and data collection is paramount, while the explanation and analysis of findings often takes a backseat. After all, if…

Research Findings: Three infants were followed over the course of 9 months from their last semester in their infant classroom through their transition to a toddler classroom at a university-based child care center. Using participant observation, video observation, and teacher interview, we qualitatively constructed and analyzed profiles of each…

Shades of Pink study describes how six preschoolers and their teacher engaged in a collaborative learning project through which they learned about the shades of a color--in this case, pink. As the children learned through experimenting and discussing their theories, they represented ideas using art as a tool for discovery and learning. The study…

Research apprenticeships for secondary students provide authentic contexts for learning science in which students engage in scientific investigations with practicing scientists in working laboratory groups. Student experiences in these research apprenticeships vary depending on the individual nature of the laboratory in which students have been…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a new approach to performance appraisal training. Motivated by split-brain theory and existing studies of cognitive information processing and performance appraisals, this exploratory study examined the effects of a whole-brain approach to training managers for implementing performance…

Constant technological advancement has facilitated access to digital cameras and cell phones. Involving students in a video production project can work as a motivating aspect to make them active and reflective in their learning, intellectually engaged in a recursive process. This project was implemented in high school level physics laboratory…

Two of the most frustrating things for me as a teacher are the way units and jargon can get in the way of understanding concepts. When I teach pre-nursing and medical students about blood pressure, they end up memorizing a lot of information that would be obvious if they had remembered some of their basic physics--particularly the ability to…

Decision makers can become trapped by "myopic regret avoidance" in which rejecting feedback to avoid short-term "outcome regret" (regret associated with counterfactual outcome comparisons) leads to reduced learning and greater long-term regret over continuing poor decisions. In a series of laboratory experiments involving repeated choices among…

This article reports for the first time the use of a plastic optical fibre (POF) cantilever beam to measure the density of a liquid. The sensor is based on the Archimedes buoyancy principle. The sensor consists of a POF bonded on the surface of a metal beam in the form of a cantilever configuration, and at the free end of the beam a displacer is…

The molecular events that are responsible for strengthening synaptic connections and how these are linked to memory and learning are discussed. The laboratory preparations that allow the investigation of these events are also described.

For teachers, a common difficulty when introducing scientific thinking is finding ways to engage the participation of the students. Because most scientific problems require at least some specialized knowledge to formulate and solve, it can be hard to go beyond merely discussing the steps of the scientific method and illustrating them with the…

This paper presents a laboratory exercise used to teach principal components analysis (PCA) as a means of surface zonation. The lab was built around abundance data for 16 oxides and elements collected by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in Gusev Crater between Sol 14 and Sol 470. Students used PCA to reduce 15 of these into 3 components, which,…

This book examines how common e-learning technologies open up compelling, if limited, experiential spaces for users, similar to the imaginary worlds opened up by works of fiction. However, these experiential worlds are markedly different from the "real" world of physical objects and embodied relations. This book shows these differences to be of…

Access to state-of-the-art instrumentation, namely nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, early in the college curriculum was provided to undergraduate students in an effort to improve student perceptions of science. Proton NMR spectroscopy was introduced as part of an aspirin synthesis in a guided-inquiry approach to spectral…

Graduate teaching assistants are often left out of the science teacher education reform agenda, but these science educators are responsible for significant amounts of undergraduate instruction especially at large research universities. Within science departments specifically, a number of courses and laboratories are taught by graduate teaching…